Improved Simultaneous Multi-slice imaging with Composition of k-space Interpolations (SMS-COOKIE) for myocardial T(1) mapping

The aim of this study is to develop and evaluate a regularized Simultaneous Multi-Slice (SMS) reconstruction method for improved Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging (CMR). The proposed reconstruction method, SMS with COmpOsition of k-space IntErpolations (SMS-COOKIE) combines the advantages of Iterative Self-consistent Parallel Imaging Reconstruction (SPIRiT) and split slice-Generalized Autocalibrating Partially Parallel Acquisitions (GRAPPA), while allowing regularization for further noise reduction. The proposed SMS-COOKIE was implemented with and without regularization, and validated using a Saturation Pulse-Prepared Heart rate Independent inversion REcovery (SAPPHIRE) myocardial T(1) mapping sequence. The performance of the proposed reconstruction method was compared to ReadOut (RO)–SENSE-GRAPPA and split slice-GRAPPA, on both retrospectively and prospectively three-fold SMS-accelerated data with an additional two-fold in-plane acceleration. All SMS reconstruction methods yielded similar T(1) values compared to single band imaging. SMS-COOKIE showed lower spatial variability in myocardial T(1) with significant improvement over RO-SENSE-GRAPPA and split slice-GRAPPA (P < 10(−4)). The proposed method with additional locally low rank (LLR) regularization reduced the spatial variability, again with significant improvement over RO-SENSE-GRAPPA and split slice-GRAPPA (P < 10(−4)). In conclusion, improved reconstruction quality was achieved with the proposed SMS-COOKIE, which also provided lower spatial variability with significant improvement over split slice-GRAPPA.